There were 40,000 Jews in Riga in July 1941, when the Germans occupied Latvia. 33,000 of them were interned in the ghetto, and most of them (according to Schneider's estimate, 29,000) were killed in November-December 1941 in the Rumbuli forest. At the same time, numerous Jews from the Reich began to be deported to the ghetto of Riga. Ca. 20,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews arrived there during the winter of 1941-42; 800 of them survived the war, which is much greater than the numbers of German Jewish survivors from the ghettos of Łódź, Minsk, Kaunas, etc. Presents a story of life and death in the ghetto, focusing mainly on the "German" part of it; the story is largely based on testimonies of survivors, including Schneider's own (she was deported to the Riga ghetto from Vienna in February 1942). Many of the Jews were sent to the Jungfernhof camp near the city, rather than to the ghetto. Later, some were transferred from the ghetto to the Salaspils camp, and in August 1943, 7,874 Jews were sent from the ghetto to the Kaiserwald camp. The rest of the ghetto was liquidated in October 1943, and ca. 60 people were left to remove all traces of the former inhabitants, after which they were also transferred to Kaiserwald. Pp. 157-175 contain a list of survivors, and pp. 177-211 contain documents.
At the beginning of World War II, Poland was a country of fiercely independent people, living in villages rich in history, folklore, and a strong sense of pride. It was in one of these villages that a young boy aspiring to be an artist learned hard lessons about freedom, and the terror that comes when it is taken away. As Russian and German forces invade Poland and overturn the political structure, Michael is separated from his family and his friends and sent to a work camp to wait out the war. Throughout the struggles of starvation, work and punishment, with the threat of death hanging over him at all times, Michael finds an internal strength and faith that will eventually reunite him with his family and bring peace and prosperity back to Poland. Now, decades later, Michael is a delighted citizen of the United States and treats the rich history of this melting pot with the same reverence and intimacy as the story of the Three Brothers from his original home. In Leaving Terror Behind, Michael Lindner shows us that Poland and America are not so different after all: both countries are host to a people willing to fight and die for freedom and independence. By sharing his personal experiences, Michael asserts that Americans should treasure the freedom they have, and offers solid advice for all Americans who wish to preserve the independence fought for by their forefathers. Mike Lindner is a survivor of World War 2 and currently resides in North Carolina.
For his 65th birthday, acclaimed novelist Michael Mewshaw took a 4,000-mile overland trip across North Africa. Arriving in Egypt during food riots, he heads west into Libya, where billions in oil money have produced little except citizens eager to...
A woman’s true account of eighteen years as a Soviet prisoner: “Not even Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich matches it.”—The New York Times Book Review In the late 1930s, Eugenia Ginzburg was a wife and mother, a schoolteacher and writer, and a longtime loyal Communist Party member. But like millions of others during Stalin’s reign of terror, she was arrested—on trumped-up charges of being a Trotskyist terrorist counter-revolutionary—and sentenced to prison. With sharp detail and an indefatigable spirit, Ginzburg recounts her arrest and the eighteen harrowing years she endured in Soviet prisons and labor camps, including two in solitary confinement. Her memoir is “a compelling personal narrative of survival” (The New York Times Book Review)—and one of the most important documents of Stalin’s brutal regime. “Deeply significant…intensely personal and passionately felt.”—Time “Probably the best account that has ever been published of…the prison and camp empire of the Stalin era.”—Book World Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward
The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
A boy is put on a train by his stepmother to make his first journey on his own. But soon that journey turns out to be more of a challenge than anyone could have imagined as the train stalls at the mouth of a tunnel and a mysterious woman in white helps the boy while away the hours by telling him stories - stories with a difference.
Kang-i Sun Chang is Malcolm G. Chace ’56 Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. In her memoir, Journey Through the White Terror, she tells the powerful story of her father Paul Sun (1919-2007). Along with numerous others, Sun was imprisoned more than 60 years ago during the “White Terror”, the decade following the withdrawal of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government from Mainland China to Taiwan in mid-December 1949. During this time, the Nationalist government implemented a policy of “better to kill ten thousand by mistake than to set one free by oversight,” and as a result, many innocent civilians such as the author’s father became victims of ferocious searches and persecutions. At the time of her father’s arrest, Prof. Chang was not quite six years old; when her father returned home, she was almost sixteen. Having witnessed the injustice of her father’s imprisonment and the freedom their family later enjoyed in America, she felt compelled to write this story. Prof. Chang’s account of how the family survived the White Terror makes her book one of the most intense and thrilling works on the subject. But the book is also about soul-searching and the healing of a childhood trauma. It is a true story about the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Love and religion in such circumstances prove to be the ultimate deliverance. All this is described in considerable detail in this extraordinary memoir.
There was a robbery that went bad and a girl was accidentally shot dead. Just an accident. But to John Bunting, it was the end of all his hopes. The girl was his fiance. What could he do? The cops weren’t looking. He had to find the killers himself. And that’s when he ran into Linda. She had lost her husband, had stopped caring. But she knew the men responsible for the killing. She could get Bunting close to them while he figured out who fired the actual shot. They were two wounded souls, one filled with hate, the other trying to find a reason to live. It’s funny how much they needed each other . . .